PLATO
Platonism and Its Influence. By Alfred EdWard Taylor. (Harrap. 5s. net.) THE most imposing cenotaph to Plato that we possess in England was reared by Dr. Benjamin Jowett, sometime Master of Balliol. His translation of the dialogues is complete, and magnificently fitted out with a preface on how to translate, with introductions, with analyses, and with an index. Where Dr. Jowett has misunderstood Plato he hastens to put him right. It is a heavy and substantial piece of work, like Manchester Cathedral. But cenotaph we must call it ; for Plato is not within.
It is puzzling to enquire why it should ever have occurred to the great doctor to translate Plato. Possibly, as a theologian and a classical tutor and a solid Victorian, he felt he had a lien upon him. And, no doubt, there was some admixture of the desire for fame in his resolution : we suspect that of all Greek words it was 54a, With its pleasant double meaning of private opinion and general reputation, that brought most light to JOwett's eyes. But between the vision of Plato and the vision of Jowett there was as radical an incongruity as can be imagined.
It, is a question of fact, not of interpretation, upon which they differ. To Plato it was staringly true that the reality of the world was in meanings and not in things. To him, indeed, there were no mere things, no gross and independent things. All that existed was backed up by a living idea, and took its own form and existence from the idea. Leibnitz is a pure Platonist when he makes the world consist of the dialectics of non- spatial and non-temporal monads. Plato's mode of seeinglife is perhaps difficult to approach at first.' We have become accustomed to thinking of a particular thing, a boOk or a stone or an atom, as something permanent. At least, we feel instinctively, it will outlast our own space of existence. But typically to a Greek philosopher the particular was transient. The problem can be put rather crudely in this form : Is the only real substance of the universe thought and consciousness ? Or is there in fact an irreducible dross, or dead matter, which has not in itself significance to thought ? More broadly, is everything in the universe alive, or is everything dead ?
Between absolute idealism, in the sense of conceiving that the world is wholly composed of significances, and absolute mechanism, in the sense of conceiving that the world is entirely devoid of significances, there is no compromise which is not a confusion of mind. For if we try to hold what seems a natural view, that the world is irreducibly 'part mind and part matter, we shall find ourselves hopelessly at sea and quite unable to explain how matter can ever be the object of consciousness. No ultimate dualism can ever be satisfactory : we are left with two worlds which never meet or interact. It was not till Plato had been discussed and examined a thousand times that his doctrine of ideas became logically irrefutable. Hegel was Plato's rescuer on the plane of pure rationalism. But it was never Plato's aim to produce works of unassailable reason ; he was more anxious to persuade than to argue.
" The majority of men cannot even tolerate the idea of reality as something absolutely opposed to the things they know and enjoy." Then how. could Jowett be expected to understand Plato ? He was worldly-wise in his aims and his outlook, though not in any peculiarly evil fashion. He suffered as badly as most people from the confusion of mind which makes compromises in truth. He marked out a little terrain for the " hopes " of mankind—God, the soul, immortality and the rest—and was thus enabled to proceed with his ordinary ambitions and feel no pangs of heterodoxy. To read his introduction to the Phaedo after reading Plato himself is almost painful. For Plato's dialogue is in illustration of Socrates' conviction of immortality • it is not sophistry or plea-hunting, but the expansion of a mind with a clear illumination. But Jowett takes it on himself to give what 'night serve as a well-balanced summing-up after a series of articles in the popular Press ; a leading article on " The Pros and Cons of Immortality." And even this might be passed over but for the condescension with which he speaks of Plato and Aristotle themselves.
Still, the work is a monument of a kind, useful to the student and convenient for the ordinary reader. Better translations can be obtained only piecemeal—one of the Symposium, another of the Apology, a third of the Republic. Jowett's is even now the least disturbing translation of the complete canon that is easily procurable.
The revolution which Plato accomplished in European thought, and the depth of his effect, can be judged from the fact that Aristotle seems to us now and has seemed since the Renaissance to be the antithesis of Plato ; and scholars and philosophers have often become unbending partisans of one or the other: In his own age Aristotle was regarded as the most orthodox of all Platonists. He is, as it were, applied Plato. But their agreement has passed into the substance of civiliza- tion :- we live after them and through them. When Christianity becomes established, when it makes the atmosphere Of religious thought, we can feel for the first time that Peter and Paul are antithetic types. When the world becomes narrow under the influence of Paul, we can see it widen again under the influence of John. And so, when the common essentials of Plato and Aristotle are rooted in our thought, we can distinguish their influences and see in'history how first one came in to give a new impetus, how this impetus worked itself out, and how afterwards the other rose, as it appeared, for the salvation of Europe and brought a fresh stirring in human minds. Professor A. E. Taylor's admirable volume on Platonism traces the successive contributions of Platonic thought to the life of Europe, and the sense of awakening and eagerness that acCOmpanied each new start. A. P.
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